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The Media Your Rights Online

The End of Digital Democracy 16

Posted by timothy from the regulators-versus-the-free-market dept.
Stuart Park writes: "According to this article, this year could be very important for media ownership and internet access with a lot of pressure on the FCC and the U.S. Government to remove restrictions thus allowing a small number of large corporations to control everything. Help stop it happening via this link."
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The End of Digital Democracy More

The End of Digital Democracy

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  • 'ha ha sucks to be living in the US' but I remembered that these days the EU is doing more or less the same kind of thing.

    I really must get round to moving to the moon.

    Alternatively: the free, wireless lan based networks that seem to be growing up could form a BBS-like 'underground' for people to spread non-official information. Who'd have thought all that uucp knowledge would come in useful!
  • The idea of loosening restrictions is absurd, as they weren't tight enough before. Allowing 30% ownership of the market? That means that an ENTIRE market can be almost completely owned by 4 companies. This is not a good condition for competition, and allows companies to easily set up cartels.

    History has proven time and again that monopolies never serve the public's interest overall. They may have some fringe benefits, but overall, in the long run, they always screw the public interest over -- good intentions or not. Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil, AT&T, and MS are just some examples. Lets take AT&T: as Lawrence Lessig states, the idea for redundant networks and datagrams (packets) as a method to carry data in a phone conversation had been proposed to AT&T very early one; they rejected it, even though it was superior, because of the risk. Were there competition, it would've been implemented. MS, another example, engages in competition squashing, and prevents any other OS from competing, as all hardware and software developers (or almost all) develop for Windows; furthermore, they use their monopoly in one position to try to gain a monopoly in another.

    No company should be allowed to obtain over 10% of the market. If they do, the company should have to mandatorily be split into two separate parts of equal amount. The shareholders would still have the same amount and value in stocks; only difference is, the companies would have to compete.

    • Niches & Profits (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Annoying ( 245064 )
      There are some industries that can't support very many companies due to the markets they serve. If a company gains 50% in a niche that 5 companies compete in but none of them can make a profit off their marketshare (including the company with 50%) then they would all fail. The niche wouldn't be served and for trying to limit the market share a company could gain, the consumer would have been hurt. Even some major industries can't support very many companies, aircraft for instance, how many large aircraft manufacturing copmanies are there? In the world?

      I think when it comes to media though there are already too few companies. Loosening restrictions to allow even fewer to dominate the market doesn't sound like a good thing. Just had to point out a flaw in your view.

  • Connectivity becoming linked to content (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kirruth ( 544020 ) on Sunday January 20, 2002 @01:26PM (#2872395) Homepage
    This is a very important issue (not that you'd know it from the number of responses so far!). What this is really about is letting the people who provide the connectivity for broadband connections (the cable companies and telcos) also control the content (ISP services and portals).

    What this means is that they can control the portal you use, the sites you might look at. If they see you trading MP3's they can shut you down. It's about turning the open internet into a giant corporate intranet.

    And you won't be able to go to someone else, because in your town there might not be someone else.

    The openNet coalition [opennetcoalition.org] goes into more details. Worth getting informed about.

  • I absolutely agree: too many of our channels of communication are already in too few hands. This is a threat to democracy, and not just the electronic kind.

    But I do not care at all for the response advocated on the linked Center for Digital Democracy page. Democracy is about participation in the process. Firing off an email whenever somebody tells you to is not participation.

  • The ratio of response to this post, as compared to any others today, is incredibly small. Could this be indicative of a general user base that doesn't understand the issues, or simply doesn't care?

    The internet in general has given us unprecedented access to information and learning tools, but simple human factors keep it sitting on the digital shelves: People simply don't care.

    Until such time as it takes away the things we take for granted, people will not notice or care, aside from an enlightened subset (for example, the 9 posts here before me.) But by then, it'll be too late.
    • I don't think that the people here don't care, they just don't have anything to say that would be on topic.
    • You're right. I'd say that the mass media are more "democratic" today than they've ever been in the last two centuries. William Randolph Hearst and pals controlled everything you read a hundred years ago, and through most of the twentieth century, you had three TV networks or nothing.

      Today we've got any number of socialist news sites [indymedia.org], right-wing commentary [worldnetdaily.com], plus access to everything AP and Reuters put out [yahoo.com]. Every think tank [cato.org] has the means to get their message to a worldwide audience.

      And yet, with all this, people still complain that the media aren't state-controlled enough. And these are the same people who complain that the state is run by Big Evil Corporations. (I'm not saying it isn't.) But if the state runs the media, and the BEC's run the state, how is that a good thing?
    • The ratio of response to this post, as compared to any others today, is incredibly small. Could this be indicative of a general user base that doesn't understand the issues, or simply doesn't care?

      It's not a front page story. About one in five stories aren't posted to the front page, and are only visible via searches, clicking topic icons, or browsing with next/previous instead of via the front page.

  • The URL posted - with this outrage on it... doesn't perhaps express why this is such a danger, as well as this URL:

    http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/openaccess/i ndex.html [democraticmedia.org]

    This is a terrible thing - and could very well squash what we have all come to love and enjoy.

    DO YOU want to have to go to AOL.COM and enter the keyword SLASHDOT in order to read YOUR SLASHDOT?

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